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Summer
New Jersey, Appalachian Trail Some songs that are reminding me of summer, particularly of walking along the mid-Atlantic and New England states three summers ago. This feels like it will be a very enjoyable, full summer. I feel like I didn’t get a summer last year with the move to the house—the unpacking, the flooding, the constant barrage of things to do. Now I’m just trying to keep up with the garden and yard every evening, sweating through my shirt before I work fifteen minutes. The frogs on the pond get so loud sometimes I can hear them inside the house. It’s almost like camping.
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North of Lehigh Gap | AT Video of the Week
Once again I’m digging out some videos from the AT that I never uploaded. This one is of the area at Lehigh Gap in Palmerton where the superfund site is located from the decades of zinc smelting that polluted the mountain top. As you can see it is quite a different landscape that one would expect from hiking in the Green Tunnel. You can read more about our antics in Pennsylvania here. The storm clouds show you what kind of climb and day it was—-wet. And hot. This guy gives a good perspective on the climb out of the gap.
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Beaver On The Pond
I went to a community meeting for our little town a couple of weekends ago and the council mentioned that they’d had problems with beavers in the past and that we should mention if we saw any on the pond. My hand shot up so I could mention that we’d scared something off the banks of our property on our pond the night before. Chris has long thought we had nutria or maybe otters on the pond but we’d never really had a good look. Then a couple of nights ago Chris saw one up close and called it a nutria and then he went off to Lowe’s to get…
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Multiplying Onions
When I was at my parent’s house over Mother’s Day weekend I dug up a couple bulbs of multiplying onions that my mom had in her small raised bed. I believe she received them from my brother. There was a conversation a couple of years ago about the desire to find multiplying onions as someone in my family had grown them, probably my grandmother, once upon a time. They were difficult to find, but you can find them through that link above. I have a desire to add more perennial vegetables to my garden and multiplying onions sound like a perfect addition. Right now the plants I dug up are…
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The Bird Feeders at Lost Maples State Natural Area
As our second time visiting Lost Maples State Natural Area, this time around was much quieter, though holiday weekend crowds were starting to pick up by the time we left the park over Memorial Day weekend. We arrived at mid-day and decided to hike on the west loop trail and park at the upper parking area. We had lunch next to a really cool bird blind and were able to sit and scope out feeding hummingbirds and this western scrub jay. We weren’t quite positive as to which hummingbird species this was while we were watching them zoom around the feeders, but it felt like they were something different, or…
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Gardenias….
You can almost scratch and sniff through the computer screen. The aroma is pretty heady, even more so in the evenings. Our gardenia bush is at back of the house near our porch. Chris cut it back after we moved in and it has put on a lot of growth, looking much healthier. I took a couple of pieces from the trimmings he had sometime in late winter and attempted to root them. I’d had success doing this from a plant I found at a park in Florida so I wanted to try again. So far one has succeeded and put on a leaf and the other hasn’t done anything…
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Then & Now | Changes At The House
May 14, 2012 May 31, 2013 I was going back through the photos we took on one of the visits we had to our house when we were contemplating making an offer on it to look at a tree Chris thought was leaning a lot more than when we moved in (it’s not, it was leaning just about the same then) and found the photo of the driveway and front of the house and knew I had to take a photo of how it looks now to compare. It is hard to see all of the changes but the most evident is that the grass is so much greener this…
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Natives of Texas Nursery | Kerrville, Texas
Last weekend while in the Hill Country we wanted to stop at a couple of nurseries to scope out what might be for sale in a different region than where we are in southeast Texas. We found a very tiny place near Bandera with a couple of cacti that were of interest, but didn’t buy anything. Google search and maps revealed not too many places and most of the ones that popped up were closed on Sunday, which is when we wanted to go. I found Natives of Texas and it said they were open on Sunday but I called just to verify before we left Boerne (apparently that is…